1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tracking apparatus and a tracking method to track a subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has heretofore been known to use a technique for performing automatic focus (AF) control and automatic exposure (AE) control to track a particular subject when photographing a moving body or when obtaining moving images. A tracking process is used to track the particular subject. There are various types of tracking processes, such as a tracking process that uses luminance information, a tracking process that uses color information, and a tracking process that uses face detection.
Here, when one kind of tracking process is only used, a failure in the tracking process may prevent correctly tracking processes that follow. In contrast, according to Japanese Patent No. 4506779, whether or not a face image is detected is determined by the result of a face detection in each frame. When the face image is not detected, for example, the frame in which the face image is not detected is matched with an adjacent frame to detect a part corresponding to the face image in the frame in which the face image is not detected.